ISO 45010: what the world's first menopause-at-work standard means for employers
On 7 September 2026, menopause at work got its first international standard. The standard covers both menstruation and menopause and rightly so, as both deserve proper workplace support. Because menopause is where our work sits, that's the lens we've taken here. Here is what ISO 45010 actually says, why it matters, and the one step it still leaves to you.
For years, workplace menopause support has been a patchwork. Some employers doing genuinely excellent work, many doing nothing, and no shared definition of what "good" even looks like. That changed on 7 September 2026, when the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 45010, the first international standard on menstruation and menopause in the workplace.
If menopause is anywhere on your people agenda, this is worth understanding, because it quietly resets the benchmark for every employer.
What ISO 45010 is
It's the first globally agreed guidance on supporting employees through menstruation and menopause at work. A few things make it significant:
It sits within the ISO 45000 family of occupational health and safety standards and complements ISO 45001, the widely used standard for OH&S management systems.
It builds on the foundational British standard published by BSI in 2023, taking that thinking international.
It's designed for organisations of all sizes and sectors, with additional guidance for small and medium enterprises.
ISO has made it free to access, waiving the usual cost to maximise adoption. For a body that funds itself through standards sales, that's a deliberate signal of how much this matters.
Why it matters
The quiet significance is in where it sits. By placing menopause inside occupational health and safety, the standard reframes it from an optional wellbeing perk to a mainstream health and safety consideration, alongside the other workplace risks employers are already expected to identify and manage.
It also gives employers, for the first time, an internationally agreed answer to the question we hear constantly: "what does good actually look like?"
What it covers
The guidance spans the full picture rather than any single fix. In broad terms it addresses workplace culture, policies and procedures, manager awareness and training, workplace design, practical adjustments to help people manage symptoms and stay well at work, and, importantly, how to measure and evaluate whether any of it is working.
The gap it's built to close
The research behind the standard, carried out by BSI, is the part that should give employers pause. Across 6,494 women in seven countries, 68% believe employers have a role to play in supporting menopause and menstruation-related health, and around seven in ten want their employer to have a clear, consistent approach. Yet six in ten said they have never heard their employer proactively talk about menopause support.
That is the gap between awareness and action, in a single set of figures. The standard's recurring message is exactly that: move beyond awareness, to action.
The two things that are hardest, and that matter most
Of everything the standard covers, two elements are, in our experience, the difference between a policy that looks good and support that actually works:
Equipping managers properly. Not a one-off awareness session, but genuine capability to respond well when someone comes to them, handled confidentially and within the lines.
Being able to measure whether support is truly reaching and being used. Without that, you cannot tell a real reduction in barriers from another well-meant policy.
It's notable that the standard calls out both.
The step a standard cannot take for you
Here is the honest limit. A standard can define what good looks like, raise the bar, and hold employers to it. What it cannot do is make your support reach the woman who is lying awake at 3am and has told no one.
Most of what any menopause programme offers, however well designed, still waits for her to come forward. And as the BSI research shows, most women don't experience their employer as proactive about this at all. The awareness-to-action gap the standard is trying to close is, underneath, a reach gap: the distance between support that exists and support that actually gets to her.
Where Hello Mimi fits
We are building Hello Mimi around exactly the things the standard highlights, and the gap it points to:
Mimi SmartCoach is being built to reach her directly and privately, in the moment, without needing to disclose to anyone first. That is action reaching her, rather than awareness sitting on a shelf.
Manager training and certification, to equip the managers around her to respond well, which is the standard's manager-training pillar.
A way to see whether support is genuinely being used, so employers can evaluate impact, which the standard explicitly asks for.
To be clear, ISO 45010 is guidance rather than something you certify against, and we are building towards its spirit rather than claiming a stamp. But it is a genuinely useful map, and it happens to point at the same things we do.
What to do now
Download and read ISO 45010. It's free, and it's the clearest benchmark available.
Use it to sense-check your own plan ahead of 2027.
Then ask the two questions it keeps returning to: are our managers genuinely equipped, and can we actually tell whether our support reaches people?
If you're working through what that looks like for your organisation, we'd be glad to talk it through.
About this article This article is educational and general in nature and summarises publicly available information about ISO 45010, published by the International Organization for Standardization on 7 September 2026, and the associated BSI research. It is not legal advice; for your organisation's specific obligations, consult a qualified employment-law professional. ISO 45010 is available directly from ISO.